Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Did She Eat Her Babies?

Imagine if you will, a quarter of a billion years ago, a clap of thunder so colossal that it sounds as if the clouds are made of mountains. A great volcano has erupted, ejecting cubic miles of hot rock and ash into the atmosphere. In the distance, in the wake of the Earth's inner mechanical conflicts manifest as the release of it's bowel's most devastating hell fire, ancient creatures congregate at a withering water hole as it absorbs the scorching dust and fat ashen flakes of a crumbling heaven, heavily laden with more silica than air in it's upper reaches. In this apocalyptically doomed environment, the babies died first. Would an ancient carnivore unbound by such human notions of morality not resort to desperately devouring the flesh of her fallen offspring for the life giving moisture contained therein? Two hundred and fifty million years later this callous cannibal mother would be unearthed to tell her grizzled tale. Her bones, now stone, bare the evidence of a clutch worth of tiny, infantile skeletal remains where her stomach once was. But wait! There are more bones there than her tummy would hold. The truth is that she died on top of them. Click HERE for Wikipedia's excellent analysis of the alleged crime scene.

I had originally purchased this cast from PaleoSearch, a purveyor of incredible fossils and casts since 1983. Their catalog offered Coelophysis Bauri as an excellent fiberglass and resin cast, framed and painted. I custom ordered the piece without it's frame or paint. It arrived as a cast white panel. I then cut it out of it's rectangular matrix so as to more closely follow the creatures shape. I built up the edges with a sculpting epoxy and painted it with a faux bronze finish. In the spirit of Rock and Roll, she seems poised to take a bite out of the Yamaha as she ballances on her tail like Tigger the Tiger.